The Crayak Chronicles: Rise of a God, Fall of an Emperor
by Master of the Boot
Summary: Crayak was always a being of pure evil from his very inception. But truthfully he is not some kind of phantom stranger or outsider. Once upon a time, Crayak was loved and worshiped, called Emperor and a god in a timeline that no longer exists. The truth of Crayak's origins will shatter your mind and destroy your reality. Welcome to the Crayak Chronicles
1. The Never Now

Rise of a God, Fall of an Emperor: The Crayak Chronicles

Author's note: I do not own any of the third party properties depicted within. This is a non-profit venture totally separate from KA Applegate and Games Workshop. Now enjoy.

 _Prologue_

His name was Jake. Once he'd been a boy. Once he'd been innocent, sometimes happy. That was before the war with the Yeerks. That was before the murder, the lies and worse. Jake became a general; in deed if not in name. When Jake became a general, he started making life and death decisions; almost always it was more death than life. That was before he'd become the leader of _The Animorphs_.

There wasn't a day that went by when he wasn't consumed with self-loathing and guilt. The boy Jake had become a man; a colonel and the leader of Earth's first unit of morph capable Special Forces. The guilt fundamentally meant nothing,; it was trampled to the back of his brain to make room for duty.

Jake was the guy that people naturally turned to. If a building was burning they'd look to him to lead them to the exit. It wasn't something he'd wanted or even been aware of for most of his life. He definitely didn't feel like that magical leadership quality made him a better person or someone worth looking up to. He saw himself as bum, a loser; someone who could be counted on to wear the executioner's mask without losing themselves to the role.

And Jake was in hell.

Jake was in the realm of Crayak.

Funny how he thought that an alien invasion was the weirdest thing that might have possibly happened to him; that was before Jake found out that he and his friends were pawns to a pair of godlike beings with power over the fourth and fifth dimensions.

One was the Ellimist; manipulative, anarchic, unpredictable and "good" if you really squinted.

The other was Crayak. A name whispered by the least sane and most bloodthirsty in the Galaxy. He was a byword on a hundred billion planets for devil, boogie man, monster, _other_. To have the cyclopean, red eye of Crayak on you was a fate worse than eternal damnation.

Winds—if there was atmosphere in Crayak's gloomy netherworld dimension, ripped the garments off of Jake's body and then his skin. He tried to scream as the shifting physical forces of this place ripped his lungs right out of his mouth. His eyes bulged and Jake became a dog waiting to be put out of its misery.

Crayak however would not allow him to die.

As the medium around him began to turn acidic and cook Jake's flesh, he heard the voice of Crayak through the pain.

 **I WANT YOU TO LOOK AT ME, JAKE. LOOK AT ME.**

The voice was everywhere and it was the very essence of totality. Everything of Crayak was total. There was no shifting, no changing, just plain pure decisiveness.

Jake thrashed like an insect trapped in a pitcher plant but the acidic ether started to turn solid and held him like amber.

 **I HAVE SOMETHING TO SHOW YOU, JAKE. SOMETHING THAT YOU NEED TO KNOW.**

The boy who grew up to be a killer could not look away.

At first he saw the Crayak that all others saw. An abomination shit out from the darkest pits of cyberpunk nightmare. A fleshy, crystalline, bulky mass of quivering non-flesh sat upon a throne higher than anything you could name.

All saw Crayak as something different, horrible, other; the sum of their nightmares. There were two features of Crayak that always stayed the same; the physical form it projected to mortal beings had no arms—they were irrelevant. The avatar that Crayak projected to mortals always featured a single, blood red eye that never blinked.

Jake saw that, he saw it all and more. He saw everything that Crayak had been seen as on a million galaxies and in a quintillion nightmares.

But he was the first person to see Crayak—to truly see—the one ideal master of evil.

Crayak could for the first—or last—time, smile.

 **So you've opened your eyes.**

The demon god's once thundering voice had lowered to something painless and even . . . noble sounding.

The Throne remained, still taller than the length of the universe and beyond. But now the crimson throne seemed to shine with polished rose gold and precious rubies. The thing on the throne detached and started to evaporate into its true self.

When Jake saw Crayak for what it really was, he became too afraid to scream.

Standing before him was what Crayak looked like before he'd risen to godhood and manipulated the third dimension like clay.

Crayak came from a bipedal species with two legs, two arms and a crest of thick fur on the top of the head. His species had no tail, unlike the rest of the bipeds in the galaxy.

In a word, Crayak was human.

Crayak smiled at Jake, a halo of light surrounding him and burning brighter than the big bang.

Jake's heart and mind fought against Crayak. He was lovely; he was everything handsome, beautiful and gorgeous. Yet he struggled to reconcile these feelings of near religious worship with the knowledge of the truth.

One full half of him wanted Crayak to be the savior, the angel of justice that would sweep away all the evils and terrors. The other full half of him knew that Crayak had made every one of those terrors, that he was the source of evil itself.

Crayak shifted in his golden power armor, standing high above even the tallest humans in history. In one oversized power fist was a sword fit for a god. His right eye projected that irresistible glamor that could melt the strongest minds and turn them into his slaves. It was the left eye that told the truth.

That left eye of Crayak, blood red and cloudy was the one truth on the multiverse's best disguise.

The eye of Crayak was inescapable, even to its owner.

All went silent and Jake found his flesh and body restored. The torment was erased, leaving behind nothing but mental scars.

Jake of the Animorphs looked up at Crayak with the weeping, red eyes of a frightened child.

Ceramite joints hissed as Crayak took off his mighty power fist, crackling with exotic energies. His single large hand reached out like God touching Adam.

"I don't want this," Jake whispered, a single tear dripping down his cheek and falling into the sterile nothing.

Crayak's Olympian frame shook with a chuckle and his stentorian broque reverberated through reality. **"From the moment you came into this world, you were born into bondage. When you fell, it was I who carried you. Today, the threads of fate come together; I will kill the child and the man shall become my champion in the mortal world. By my will, you will be the savior of humanity."**

The god of all evil, who'd once been called Emperor and then God pressed his palm to Jake's head. A white light glowed out of the boy's eyes.

Crayak's good eye narrowed, and only his ruined red orb remained; and Crayak knew that it was good, but it was not perfect.

" **At least it is true,"** The God Emperor of Mankind sneered, **"That you will do your job well enough."**

And in the light of the golden throne, Jake the boy saw the story of Crayak before he was erased forever.

* * *

This honestly came about after watching _The Empire Strikes Back_ _._ There's a lot of times in fiction where some character is an orphan and they find out their parent or parents are some wonderful figure. I liked in _Star Wars_ how Luke's father wasn't some great guy but a homicidal maniac responsible for great misery. In the Prequels, when Anakin massacres younglings, I rather enjoyed the hell out of it.

I admit I'm fascinated by messianic or destined figures turning bad and doing unspeakable things. When it comes to Warhammer, much of the fandom is quick to defend the God Emperor because he's less worse than the Chaos gods. To me that's not just obvious, but it's very boring.

I want to write something about the fall of the God Emperor, somebody who in the lore half the time is like Space Hitler. A friend of mine compared him to a Necron in terms of his ability to relate to humanity.

Finally this was inspired by Michael Moorcock, who features works about the clash between order and chaos; where gods of Order are as terrifying and genocidal as gods of chaos.

So let me know what you think.


	2. Primal Era

The Crayak Chronicles: Fall of an Emperor, Rise of a God

Chapter 1: The Primal Era

 _My name is Crayak. It has always been "Crayak."_

 _So many times, I took on aliases and was given titles, nicknames and curses._

 _A thousand monikers were assigned to me before I'd seen my first millennium._

 _But I was always Crayak. I was the stability in a world of turmoil and chaos. I was_ _ **constant.**_

 _I came from an Earth in the Mesolithic, a thousand timelines removed from now but it was one that was almost identical to the one today. The world back then was in the grip of an ice age and the herds were thinning, moving out of their usual grazing grounds and becoming less plentiful._

 _By the time I was born to a human mother, the extinction had been going on for more generations than my primitive people could have possibly known. I had twelve brothers, of which I was the youngest and the sole survivor._

 _My mother passed with my birth but my father had many women and if I wasn't loved I was at least cared for._

 _As a man I grew up strong, mean and unsentimental. I inherited leadership of a dying tribe._

 _When the disease struck, I was among the first to feel its effects._

The red haired humanoid stumbled in the melting spring snow and coughed up blood. His tall, thin body wracked with the illness. He lacked the understanding to know where the disease had come from; a piece of meat undercooked, something in his drinking water or something he breathed in.

The coughing grew worse, not better. Falling forward, he caught himself on the half exposed earth; freezing mud and dirty snow sucked up the heat from his twig like hands. Gasping, he forced his ravaged body to try and get back to some semblance of order.

Tears slid from his red, puffy eyes and his hominid face contorted into a grimace; his pain only partly physical.

He uttered a word, the language was primitive but its inventors had grasp of the concept of betrayal, treachery.

He snarled over chipped, blackened teeth.

The disease was killing him and blurring his vision but he could still hear and what he heard was not comforting. Footfalls broke a branch in the underbrush and more than just one pair of feet.

The dying primitive grasped a flint knife at his belt. He'd thought since he was a boy of fighting a warrior's death, with dozens of sons to carry on his legacy and many wives to mourn him. Instead his hair rose and adrenaline spiked with a prey animals fear. The primitive man would fight, die violently but the courage he'd always thought of himself as having had deserted him. Without his tribe and his status, he was no better than the rabbits fleeing to their warrens.

They came before long, two hunters armed with flint headed spears and a third. Triple sets of eyes looked at the sick man-thing; similar casts but a different species of humanity. The middle one wrapped in bulky furs and elaborate face paint pointed at the captive.

The sick man grit his teeth, causing one rotten too to pop out. The main made him wince and his inability to hide his discomfort added to his shame.

The spear wielding hunters approached, their curly raven hair gleaming and large mouths panting.

He tried to shout and thrust out with his dagger but his ravaged lungs acted up and he doubled over. The knife wasn't really for hunting and it was only minimally good for defence. In a roundabout way it was to make sure he didn't starve to death.

A spear thrust through his right thigh, missing the artery and destroying the tendons. The couching fit intensified and several ribs cracked from the violence of it. A second spear went through his other leg; the exiled former chieftain wept tears of blood.

Barking coughing tore apart the wounded, pinned primitive worse than the spears. In futile fantasy he wished that his disease may pass on to this enemy tribe. The shaman began to command the two hunters and they shifted to give their superior the room he needed.

The primitive man was broken, exhausted, and almost unable to hold the knife he'd been given to commit suicide with; before him the enemy shaman chanted in a language he did not speak and brandished a well-crafted stone headed club.

Theatrically, the clouds covered the weak spring sun and cold ravaged the humiliated primitive. He looked up as the shaman raised his club with both hands. Even hate or revenge was beyond the defeated anthropoid. Tears of blood poured as the blood vessels in his eyes ruptured, snot dripped down his face and the last of his teeth were falling out. In the unlikely event he survived, he would never be able to walk again and would end up food for a wild animal before infection could kill him.

What he did next was pure panic, the last kick of a dying deer as its throat is ripped out by a dire wolf. The captive's knife hand lashed out. The shaman's eyes widened as the flint blade cut through his throat.

The primitive man fell back, vomiting the last meagre meal he'd eaten.

Eyes bulging in the shock of a fallen predator, the shaman fell without his joints bending. Blood arced through the air with each heartbeat and he died without uttering a word.

The primitive man didn't hear the curse of the two hunters as they ripped the spears out of his legs; better to drive those delightful flint points into his throat as repayment.

Then something happened; something that should have been impossible but happened anyway.

The dying, primitive man saw the Shaman's life force leaving his body. He was a superstitious man; he and his people knew nothing of the natural world, they existed despite it. The spirits they invented to explain the world were omnipresent and never seen. This was the first time that the dying hominid had ever seen a spirit.

Something took over, buried in his hind brain from before the era of the reptiles; from a time long forgotten.

Hunger.

A new, unknown hunger had awakened in the man and pure shameless greed ordered him to reach out.

He took the life of the Shaman as it left his body, before it could dissipate or go . . . somewhere. A strange intuition told him that his people's afterlife myths were a lie. But the taste of this soul was no myth. It was as real as the disease wrecking his physical shell.

That rush he got from the Shaman's soul was like nothing he'd ever experience. He would eventually take thousands of souls, taste their joys and suffering and inflict genocide upon the enemies of his former tribe.

For the first time since the sickness struck, the primitive felt strong; strong enough to take on the pair of hunters thrusting their hunting weapons at him.

For the first time since the sickness struck, he smiled.

The seasons came and the seasons went and the ice age grew worse. The once-dying primitive found a new strength and a new calling. No longer did he age; no longer did he hunger or thirst. All he craved now were the souls of the shamans; wherever he found them he killed them and took their life force.

With a great strength unimaginable to the various species of human in this age, he tore the head of the shaman and sucked in the soul. Nearly twice as tall as the primitive humans, the new man laughed as the tribe fled him. No spear could harm him and the wild beasts obeyed his commands. He'd become a king-spirit.

The man smiled, straight hair turned black since his first taking of a shaman soul. The winds whipped harsh and snow fell thick. To show his disdain for the spirits of winter he wore naught but a loincloth and many beads, necklaces and decorations taken from his victims.

The large, hulking man grew tired of the weather and waved his hand. The spirits complied and the snow and clouds left, leaving the pale winter sun. The man smirked and crossed his arms over his vast, bronze chest. Though his language lacked the word, he'd begun to think of himself as a god.

Yet the need for shaman souls was ever present and no matter how powerful he became it was never powerful enough.

So he walked. From the analogue of the Carpathian Mountains to the edge of Siberia and the far shores of Africa he walked. When he'd walked there he walked over the ice bridge to North America and took himself from the frozen tundra to the sweltering jungles.

All across the way he sought the shamans and none could stop him. Even ones with powers to control the spirits as he could not match him in power or finesse; the man conquered all. The man knew that he'd walked the breadth of the world and he had conquered all before him.

Someone with a heart would have wept for having no more tribes to conquer and intimidate; he rejoiced. He rejoiced over the carcasses of the shamans like a vulture. He lived to feed and feed his addiction. Nothing else mattered; dreams of sons, wives and legacies were long forgotten.

Except there was nothing else to feed the addiction; he found there were no more shamans, no more witches, soothsayers or wizards. The world had become quiet empty and he must take his enjoyment from memories.

Gloating satisfaction gave way to melancholy as without the means to feed addiction, there really wasn't much of a purpose for him. A sensation took him which he'd not felt ever, even as a mortal; boredom. He became devastatingly, cripplingly bored. It became as unto death for him.

Five thousand years had passed since he first lay dying in the weak spring sun and he could find no more shamans. For a hundred years he'd sat cross legged in the sheltered mountain valley where his tribe had once resided. He watched and waited. No birds flew over him and no animals dared walk near him. Only some crazed humans passed to leave sacrifices for him, calling him a new word that he was not familiar with, "god."

He didn't actually know what a god was or what they meant when they called him it. Possibly he was the first god they'd ever seen. His brows furrowed in focus as more of the deranged humans left sacrifices for him and then proceeded to slaughter each other for his favor. He never once spoke to them or let them know he was listening but since all the shamans were dead and the link to the spirits forever gone he was all they had.

It was a bit like falling in love with your own rapist.

It was sad.

He gave an imperceptible sigh as primitives over the span of a hundred years fought wars, killed each other's children and committed vile torture.

He had killed all the shamans for purely selfish needs, but these newfound religious feelings baffled him. It seemed a form of psychosis had taken on the various species of humanity all across the world; if he reached out with his mind he could feel the gaping wounds in their collective psyche.

It was this need to be right, born not from curiosity but from dumb animal fear.

This was something that he understood, he took a decade to raise one eyebrow and fifty years to prop his face on his hand. Fear was something he understood all too well. He'd seen long dead father rule with fear and he knew it was a powerful poison but it was also infectious.

Perhaps he had given humanity this fear that he'd inherited from the circumstances of his ascension.

Then a noise shook him out of meditation and funk.

"Crayak!"

He jolted upright, the mere force of him standing up frightened animals for thousands of kilometers.

Crayak's eyes narrowed at the one addressing him. It was an old man with long white beard and one missing eye covered by a patch.

The abomination narrowed his eyes at the old man and spoke in a booming, stentorian voice, "You are talking to me." A growl of menace underlined his words.

"Crayak, you monstrosity, I know what you are and you are no god."

Surprise came writ across the immortal's features and then a relieved smile. "Thank you, these so called prayers and sacrifices get rather tiresome. What can I do for you?"

The old man's joints creaking were almost audible as he raised an obsidian headed spear, "I've come to kill you!"

Crayak cocked his head, "Is that all?" he asked, "Do we have anything else to discuss?"

The old man's one eye gleamed bright as he charged with his spear. Crayak did not even have to move a muscle, with his mind he simply threw the old man aside.

The old man wasn't as frail as he looked, getting up and shrugging off his brittle, cracked ribs. The fire in him hadn't gone out and he wasn't the least bit daunted by killing an all-powerful immortal.

"I like you," proclaimed Crayak, "It's why I haven't crushed your skull, yet."

A tossed spear was his only reply, which took Crayak no effort to dodge. This was definitely the most amusing day he'd had in five thousand years.

A flint arrow struck him in the eye and shattered, causing him not even the slightest bit of discomfort. Giant strides took Crayak to the old man, who had drawn a bow from under his fur cloak.

"This has been almost funny, what's your name?" the immortal giant did not wait for an answer as he tore the old man's arm from his right shoulder.

The ancient human screamed and flailed. Feeling bored and needing to lighten the mood, Crayak telekinetically summoned the spear and the broken arrow and thrust them through the old man's leg. He raised one arm thick as a tree trunk over the old man and prepared to finish him when the elder looked at him.

"My name is Ulric and you are an abomination."

Crayak's fist paused for the span of a millisecond before he crushed the old man into gore.

Abomination.

No he definitely wasn't an abomination.

One of a kind, tall, mighty; these described him well.

He certainly wasn't an abomination, not like the people who tried to sacrifice him eons ago.

It was less than a millisecond before something happened that was as unexpected as the ascension of a primitive human near death in the Mesolithic era.

Ulric's body exploded in blue flamed and for the first time in his second life, Crayak felt pain. The fire of Ulric burnt his skin, his muscles and wiped out his bones.

Though his physical body was destroyed, Crayak knew that he would live. He would rebuild his body from nothing and continue as before; constant. He just wished that he was dead.

Suddenly, he could hear the screams of all the shamans he'd killed and consumed. They were more than memory now, they were as much a part of him as his hands or ears and they felt what the felt. To hurt them was to hurt himself and to hate them was to hate himself. He felt all the fear, hate, uncertainty and human instability that the shamans had felt.

More than that, he felt the collective emotions of humanity, as though Ulric's dead had given him a splinter of empathy; enough to drive him insane. Crayak's scream of agony was enough to cause the extinction of nearly even other species of humanity on the globe save the group that Ulric had belonged to, that Crayak had once belonged to.

Homo sapiens.

In that moment, Crayak felt the extinction of the human species he'd been cousin and kin to. In their own unique ways they'd all been one and all had a similar heart and soul. It was the first and last time that Crayak would ever regret killing strangers.

Terror overcame Crayak and it was million times more intense and irrational than the brute religious fear of the sacrifice givers and lotus eaters.

Bodiless but very much aware of himself, Crayak writhed invisibly in the space beyond space; in the area without area that would one day be called the warp. He saw the vastness of space and time and it terrified him; next to that he was less than the meager single celled organisms that infest human shit.

So terrified of the vast universe was Crayak that he looked inward, more than he'd ever done during his paltry century or two of meditation.

And he saw the strangest thing in his soul. He saw two . . . paths? Two . . . symbols?

Definitely two choices.

There were two _things_ before him and Crayak had to make a choice. It was not a fair or informed choice but it was a choice all the same.

To his left was an arrow, straight, single, unified; orderly.

To his right was an eight pointed star; infinite, spanning, chaotic.

Between them was a vague, indefinable sense of balance; it demanded that he forever choose neither and become the enemy of both. It was a razor's edge between the extremes.

But as the fires of Ulric ceased to burn his disembodied mind, Crayak recoiled from the eight pointed star in fear and he shuddered at the perilous purgatory of balance.

He chose the single path of order, even as he himself was a violation of that law and order. Maybe he chose precisely because he knew in that one non-second of non-time that he was a violation of order.

Order made everything easier. Suddenly he could see everything in black and white. Everything was binary. Not like the multicolored, swirling mess of chaos or the strangling non-allegiance of balance.

Crayak came down from the heavens as the first true generations of non-psyker religious shamans rose and commit mass suicide. They pleaded for a savior in a time when wise men and women had been replaced by the insane and the craven. Voices heard were no longer wisdom of spirits but psychosis and lies.

So Crayak came down as a baby to a mortal woman. Homo sapiens were the last species of humanity left and he would forevermore become their protector; whether they wanted him to be or not.


End file.
